Chapter 5 Flashcards
Transitional relationships
Sustained social interactions between two or more parties, each of whom lives in a different country.
Social interaction
Everyday encounters in which people communicate, interpret, and respond to each other’s words and actions.
Social structure
A largely invisible system that coordinates and constrains behavior in broadly predictable ways.
Social status
A human-created and defined position in society.
Ascribed statuses
Social statuses that are the result of chance in that people exert no effort to obtain them. A person’s birth order, race, biological sex, and age qualify as ascribed characteristics.
Achieved statuses
Social statuses acquired through some combination of personal choice, effort, and ability. A person’s marital status, occupation, and educational attainment are considered examples of achieved statuses.
Status set
All the statuses any one person assumes.
Master status
One status in a status set that overshadows the others such that it shapes every aspect of life and dominates social interactions.
Role
The behavior expected of a status in relation to another status.
Role set
The array of roles associated with a given social status.
Role expectations
Norms about how a role should be carried out in relation to other statuses.
Role performance
The actual behavior of the person occupying a role.
Role conflict
A predicament in which the roles associated with two or more distinct statuses that a person holds conflict in some way.
Role strain
A predicament in which there are contradictory or conflicting role expectations associated with a single status.
Group
Two or more people who share a distinct identity, feel a sense of belonging, and interact directly or indirectly with one another.
Secondary groups
two or more people who interact for a specific purpose. Secondary group relationships are confined to a particular setting and specific tasks.
Institutions
Relatively stable and predictable social arrangements created and sustained by people that have emerged over time with the purpose of coordinating human activities to meet some need, such as food, shelter, or clothing.
Institutions consist of statuses, roles, and groups.
Social network
Web of social relationships that link people to one another.
Dramaturgical model
A model in which social interaction is viewed as if it were a theater, people as if they were actors, and roles as if they were performances before an audience in a particular setting.
Impression management
The process by which people in social situations manage the setting, their dress, their words, and their gestures to correspond to the impression they are trying to make or the image they are trying to project.
Front stage
The area visible to the audience, where people feel compelled to present themselves in expected ways.
Back stage
The area out of the audience’s sight, where individuals let down their guard and do things that would be inappropriate or unexpected in a front-stage setting.
Emotional labor
Work that requires employees to display an emotional state in front of customers, suppress specific emotions, and manage customer/client emotions.
Emotional work
Conscious efforts people make to manage their feelings by evoking an expected emotional state or suppressing an inappropriate one.
